When Victory Disappears, What Is Left of the Hero?

Look at the Bodies Before Looking for the General

Lower your gaze. Snow illuminates the foreground and makes the weight of each body apparent: one person lies face down, another needs support, and another sits curled up with hands clasped tightly. At the left, a woman cradles a young soldier, while a fallen horse nearby adds another layer of helplessness. There is no climactic clash of swords here. The most powerful action is simply to hold someone up.

Then follow the figures into the distance. The dark brown column extends toward the left, its gun barrels, hats, and shoulders gradually merging with the mist. Firelight on the right offers temporary warmth but cannot ease the pressure to keep marching. The gestures of a few standing figures urge those who have stopped to rejoin the column, giving the painting two simultaneous speeds: the army keeps moving, while individual bodies are coming to a halt.

The mounted figure toward the center rear is Marshal Michel Ney, not Napoleon. Higher and more upright than those around him, he provides an important anchor for the composition. Yet the highest position does not make him the only protagonist: your eye repeatedly returns to the wounded figures in the light. Scheffer separates military command from the center of our attention, requiring us to see a leader’s responsibility alongside the suffering around him.

A Line That Keeps Narrowing Cannot Be Explained by Winter Alone

In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia at the head of a vast army made up of troops from different regions. As the army moved farther east, its supply lines lengthened, and food and horse fodder became harder to obtain. Heat, disease, desertion, combat losses, and Russian strategies of retreat and the destruction of supplies had already weakened the army before winter. The fierce fighting at Borodino also reminds us that this was not a war in which Russian forces consistently avoided battle and simply waited for the weather to win.

The capture of Moscow did not bring the peace agreement Napoleon expected. Once the retreat began, depleted supplies, pursuit, and increasingly severe weather compounded one another. Do not take the snow in the painting as the only explanation: it makes the catastrophe visible, but it cannot conceal the sequence of political and military decisions that preceded it.

Minard’s chart, made in 1869, offers another scale of observation. Brown and black bands distinguish the advance from the return; their widths correspond to recorded troop numbers, place names mark the route, and a graph below adds temperatures during the retreat. The attrition is almost immediately comprehensible as a broad band dwindles to a thin line. Yet not every reduction in troop numbers on the chart can be counted directly as a death. Detachments, separation from the army, capture, illness, and other departures from the ranks must also be understood within the scope of the data.

The crossing of the Berezina River should certainly not be reduced to a miracle performed by a single commander. Engineers under General Eblé built bridges, and the army withdrew amid fighting and confusion at a heavy cost. Ney’s rearguard actions were one part of this effort. Comparing the map and the painting clarifies a distinction: statistics let us see the scale, while the painter lets us pause beside someone who has not yet fallen.

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Ney’s Identity Complicates the Meaning of Loyalty

Known for his courage, Ney protected the army’s rear during the retreat. He remained with the retreating column after Napoleon left ahead of it for Paris in December. The emperor’s absence and the marshal’s presence can therefore be read as a contrast: the person who decides to launch a campaign and the person responsible for getting others out are not always in the same place. This is a political question raised by the image, not evidence that the painter left us an explicit declaration.

Ney’s subsequent fate would have added another layer of meaning for viewers in 1826. After the empire collapsed in 1814, he pledged allegiance to the restored monarchy; when Napoleon returned to France in 1815, he rejoined the emperor. After Waterloo, Ney was tried and executed. To different political camps, he could be either a man who broke his oath or a sacrificed hero. Whether “loyalty” should be directed toward a monarch, a country, or one’s troops had no easily agreed answer.

Later commemorative statues and Gérôme’s 1868 The Death of Marshal Ney continued to reshape this memory. A statue can keep a person standing forever; a picture of an execution leaves him fallen beside a wall. Scheffer chose an earlier moment: Ney is still leading people out of danger, but viewers already know how his story ends. That knowledge after the fact gives even his gesture of rescue a tragic dimension.

How Scheffer Learned to Paint Loss

Born in Dordrecht in the Netherlands in 1795, Ary Scheffer moved to Paris with his family in 1811 and entered the studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. Guérin’s The Return of Marcus Sextus draws on an invented story set in ancient Rome, confronting a returning man with his dead wife and grieving daughter. The figures retain the dignity of classical painting, but the emphasis has already shifted from public achievement to a family’s irretrievable loss.

Scheffer inherited this emotional language. His early depictions of the sacrifice of the burghers of Calais and the death of Louis IX placed historical figures before choices of life and death. In literary subjects such as Dante’s Paolo and Francesca and Goethe’s Marguerite, love, sin, memory, and fate exert their pull. Look at the intertwined bodies of Paolo and Francesca: their forms may be beautiful, but beauty cannot deliver them from their predicament.

This also explains why Romanticism is about more than sweet romance. Fear, solitude, the supernatural, and emotions beyond control can all lie at its heart. Scheffer brought this way of seeing people into modern warfare: before dividing soldiers into victors and vanquished, he shows their vulnerability in the face of overwhelming forces.

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Géricault: From a Rearing Horse to a Raft Calling for Rescue

In Géricault’s 1812 The Charging Chasseur, a twisting rider, a rearing horse, and a diagonal saber thrust military vitality before our eyes. Two years later, The Wounded Cuirassier shows a soldier dismounted, struggling to lead his horse away. Even without treating every work as a political allegory, the two bodily postures are enough to suggest that triumphant confidence was no longer the only emotion painting could express.

The Raft of the Medusa goes further, giving the scale of history painting to a group awaiting rescue. It draws on an 1816 shipwreck: those abandoned on a raft endured hunger, death, and despair, and the incident prompted criticism of official responsibility. Géricault studied bodies and arranged a large group so that the dead and the living raising their arms for help occupy the same picture. The figure at the top signals for assistance, yet the hope of rescue in the distance is distressingly small.

This approach also extends to his portraits of people with mental illnesses and his works depicting displacement, shipwreck, and mutual aid among wounded soldiers. Portraits once classified under labels such as “monomania” should now be viewed with an awareness of the medical categories of their time. The sitters’ eyes, wrinkles, and clothes are not evidence for us to diagnose them at a distance. What we can learn from is that sustained attention: people at the margins of heroic stories also deserve to be painted with care.

Géricault also used watercolor and printmaking to depict unnamed wounded soldiers in the retreat from Russia, placing mutual assistance before glory. This offers important contemporary context for understanding Scheffer, but similarities between works cannot by themselves prove that any particular detail was directly borrowed. Classical pyramidal composition and carefully arranged bodies remain; what changes is the purpose they serve. Monumental form can express the struggle to survive rather than serving only to celebrate conquest.

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When the Emperor Becomes the Picture’s Answer

Set Scheffer beside David’s images of Napoleon crossing the Alps, and the difference is striking. With a firm pointing gesture, a billowing cloak, and a spirited mount, David constructs an image of a will strong enough to master danger. Gros’s portrayal of the young Napoleon at the bridge of Arcole likewise makes the leader’s body indicate the direction of advance. These are not neutral records of travel or the battlefield. They establish a center worth following.

Gros’s Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa introduces another form of power: Napoleon approaches the sick and reaches out to touch them, embodying courage and compassion that overcome fear. Disease and suffering are not erased, but they are incorporated into a narrative in which the leader can soothe and save. As you look, ask whether the sick have stories of their own here, or whether they chiefly serve to demonstrate the greatness of their visitor.

Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau makes this question harder to ignore. The emperor offers care in the middle distance, but large, cold corpses lie close to the viewer in the foreground. An official image and the cost of war coexist within one painting, without either entirely subordinating the other. Scheffer carries forward the visual force of these suffering bodies, yet does not bring Napoleon into the scene to provide the whole disaster with a reassuring answer.

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Goya, Turner, and Vernet: After the War

Plate 39 of Goya’s The Disasters of War directs the almost celebratory title A Heroic Feat! With Dead Men! toward dismembered corpses, producing a sharp irony. There is no valiant encounter to admire here, only violence turning human beings into objects. A comparison with Scheffer reveals different critical tones: one directly exposes the language of great deeds, while the other measures the losses left by military achievement through gestures of mutual support.

This comparison does not mean Scheffer had seen Goya’s complete series of prints. The Disasters of War was not first published until 1863, after the 1826 Retreat. Shared concerns must be distinguished from direct influence supported by evidence.

Turner’s The Field of Waterloo, meanwhile, looks beyond a British victory and still presents viewers with darkness, bodies, and searching figures. A painting need not cheer simply because its artist belongs to the winning side. News of victory cannot end the war for everyone who has lost family. Vernet’s depiction of soldiers mourning at Waterloo, in turn, preserves the possibility of consolation through faith and commemoration.

Return to Scheffer: this column does not reach any clearly visible place of safety. The firelight is real, and so are the acts of support, but they can sustain people only over the next short stretch. The painting asks us to acknowledge that care may be limited without being meaningless.

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Why Was the Retreat from Russia Shown in an Exhibition Supporting Greece?

The Greek independence movement of the 1820s drew support from European intellectuals and artists. Newspapers, travelers’ accounts, fundraising, and volunteer involvement brought distant violence into public debate in Paris. In 1826, The Retreat appeared in a charity exhibition supporting Greece. A painting of French soldiers’ suffering could thus contribute to a humanitarian appeal surrounding another war.

Delacroix’s The Massacre at Chios responded to the catastrophe of 1822. He did not witness the events in person, but constructed his image from reports and accounts. The families in the foreground have almost lost their capacity to act, while the mounted soldier on the right still controls the violence. Figures are cut off at the edges, as if suffering continues beyond the frame. This refusal to give the center to a rescuing hero illuminates, and is illuminated by, Scheffer’s group in the snow.

Scheffer himself also painted Greek women seeking the Virgin’s protection, as well as The Women of Souli, which looks back to events in 1803. The latter presents the extreme predicament of women and children facing capture, violence, and death. In reading such a subject, we should focus on the cruelty of being deprived of choice, rather than romanticizing self-destruction as an honor women are obliged to uphold.

This support involved sympathy, but also identification with classical culture, religion, and domestic French politics. “Europeans” cannot be treated as a group with a single position. For viewers today, this raises another question: how can a painting extend our sympathy, and whose suffering might it leave outside its frame?

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A Painter to Royalty Can Also Paint Victims

Scheffer was closely connected to the Orléans family, teaching family members and painting their portraits; Princess Marie herself also practiced sculpture. These relationships remind us that an artist’s ideas, work, and income can rarely be sorted neatly into two boxes labeled “official” and “opposition.” Nor can Scheffer’s political hopes be reduced to an unwavering republican position throughout his life.

For the Gallery of Great Battles at Versailles, he painted The Battle of Tolbiac, bringing Clovis and traditions surrounding the origins of French kingship into the national historical narrative. His ideas related to La Marseillaise, meanwhile, reveal the power of mobilization, freedom, and collective action. Comparing such revolutionary imagery with Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People shows how actual crowds and allegorical figures work together to persuade an audience. Dynastic origins and contemporary freedom can coexist within one painter’s work.

A storm at sea can also carry different meanings. Delacroix’s 1822 The Barque of Dante depicts a journey through hell, using struggling bodies and intense color to create unease. Scheffer’s 1823 Saint Thomas Aquinas Preaching Trust in God during a Storm instead contrasts frightened passengers with a steadfast saint. Even when people are similarly trapped by an overwhelming force, a religious image can point toward the refuge offered by faith.

In scenes of Alsatian civilians leaving their homes, those who wish to return and resist, those who stop loved ones from taking risks, and those who lead others away bear different responsibilities. These subjects share more than dark colors with The Retreat. They share a dilemma: when events exceed individual control, what actions might still help the people nearby?

The Retreat Looks Chaotic, but It Was Carefully Composed

Scheffer was not standing at the roadside quickly recording a passing moment. He organized the scene through drawings and oil studies: Ney stands near the apex of a roughly triangular arrangement, figures on either side provide support, and the larger bodies in the foreground draw us into the group. During the process, he also adjusted the positions of figures by the fire and those holding the wounded. Chaos is the subject; making chaos legible is the painter’s work.

The pose of the woman holding the young man on the left may remind viewers familiar with European religious imagery of the Pietà: a body drained of strength is received into another person’s arms. This echo gives an ordinary soldier’s suffering a sense of solemnity. It does not, however, establish that the woman is his mother or license us to invent a shared biography that the picture does not supply.

The brown crowd, gray sky, and broken brushwork give clothing and faces a rough texture; touches of red, flames, and bright snow give the eye places to settle in the darkness. These choices do not simply transfer history “as it really was” onto canvas. They shape the emotional terms and distance through which we approach it.

Reproductive prints can also help us distinguish figures in the painting’s dark areas, but they translate the work into another medium. The aging of the original materials, display lighting, photography, and screens may all affect the lights and darks we see today. A single digital image is not enough to establish how bright a particular passage originally was. Comparing media should sharpen observation, rather than encourage us to treat a reproduction as an unmediated original appearance.

A Painting Can Have No Ending

History painting often singles out a decisive instant: a coronation, a surrender, a death, a victory. Scheffer instead brings together many small actions, keeping us within an ongoing condition. To keep walking may mean collapse; to stop may also mean death. Saving another person requires strength, yet one’s own strength is already exhausted. These difficulties create profound tension without requiring a single dramatic event.

Courbet’s Hunter on Horseback, from around 1864, offers a later comparison: a person and horse pause in a desolate setting, and posture itself conveys hesitation and fatigue. It is not another retreat from Russia, nor need it carry the same political meaning. Together, the works draw our attention to how painting can replace “What happens next?” with “What condition is this person in?”

The Retreat offers no compensating victory for the imperial expedition, yet it does not erase every human capacity to act. Someone is still leading the way; someone extends a hand; someone takes on another person’s weight. Rather than rushing to pronounce whether heroes remain in the picture, we might ask: once conquest loses its persuasive force, are we willing to include care, responsibility, and endurance among the measures by which we judge history?